NASA wants you to get into space … sort of. Their new Face In Space program is taking digital photos of everyday people like you and me and putting them on one of the last two Space Shuttle missions. Just head over to their website to upload a photo. Once you do that, you’ll receive a a flight confirmation and shuttle updates throughout the course of mission, in addition to a commemorative certificate signed by the mission commander which you can print out. I think it would be cool to have a digital photo frame up there showing these things, which you could see on a live webcam. I don’t know if NASA will listen to me, though…

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Want to control the Mars Rover? There’s an app for that. At EclipseCon, 2010 the annual Eclipse open source community meeting, attendees were given the challenge of creating a robotic control system to drive a NASA robot over a virtual Mars-like environment.

Peter Friese and Heiko Behrens decided to create an iPhone app which controls the robot around the fake Mars environment, utilizing the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer. For their ingenuity, they won a visit to the NASA robotics lab in L.A., a $500 dollar credit for Amazon Web Services, and a Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 robotics set. Sounds pretty awesome to me.

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Perhaps you damaged your knee and you’ve been laid up for 6 weeks straight in bed?  Or perhaps you just returned from a 6 month space exploration and your muscles are beyond atrophied?  The M310 AlterG Anti-Gravity Treadmill is the answer to your woes.

An inflatable plastic air bags surrounds your body that supports up to 80% of your body’s weight and assists athletes and astronauts to recoup lost muscle tissue.  Max speed of the M310 is 8mph and costs a mere $24,500.  Alternatively, the company behind the space age machine offers a NASA version for $70,000 and tops out at 18mph.  Despite the price it does look more practical than the hyrdo Physio Treadmill we saw earlier this year.

Video after the ‘leap’

[via Wired]

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NASA is about to change the helicopter blade as we know it.  First off, you need to understand that the current blade setup is very inefficient.  Each blade, as it passes through air, creates turbulence which for the lack of better words is a challenge for the following blade.  As a result, fuel efficiency is cut as is power and myriad of other things.  To quell this problem NASA embedded piezoelectric actuators – material that shape shifts when infused with electricity – which is just a complicated way of saying that the blades are able to adapt to a given set of instructions.  End result, assuming they’re programmed with the correct frequency, NASA’s new helicopter blades will be able to cancel out the interference and result in a more efficient helicopter.

[FastCompany]